1960. A crowd gathers in Seoul for the cornerstone laying of the new Women’s College. As attendees and representatives of the Presbyterian Church of Korea and the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) are shuttled toward the ceremony grounds, a camera is pointed, a button is pressed, and the lens captures a blurry in-between moment of incandescent joy.
A memory in motion, one that has outlived both its maker and its muse—but there is still meaning to be pulled from the shades of light, the smile so wide it seems to have cracked open across the face of this besuited man.
We’ve all heard the old adage, but I find that, within the archives, it is doubly true. A picture is worth a thousand words. It’s often not enough to simply procure an archival photograph—you must analyze it, use it as a jumping-off point for deeper research, piece together the context that it is steeped in by searching elsewhere. This is one of my favorite parts: the winding, swirling rabbit trail upon which we run, historians in pursuit of the full and fleshed out narratives of the past. Here, I offer you a story—one thousand words diving into the history behind this moment of celebration.
The story of this image begins not with the bespectacled man in the frame—rather, it begins with his father. In 1890, William Martyn Baird (1862-1931) and his new wife, Annie Laurie Adams Baird (1864-1916), were appointed to the Korea mission station. There, they served from the time of their arrival in 1891 until their respective deaths. When Annie passed at the age of 51 in 1916, her husband put her story on paper, writing a 10-page biography of his lost beloved. They are both buried in Pyongyang, where the couple settled in 1897 when William was asked to serve as the first president of Soongsil University.
Their sons, William Martyn, Jr. and Richard Hamilton, were born in 1897 and 1898. They spent their childhoods in Korea before pursuing higher education in the States.
William Jr. graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1922, was ordained shortly after by the Presbytery of New Brunswick, and was back in his home country of Korea by the following year. From 1923 to 1940, he served as a missionary under the auspices of the PC(USA)’s Board of Foreign Missions, spending his days as an itinerant country preacher, a teacher and educator at various Bible Institutes, and as a scholar working on the revision of the Korean New Testament. He and Anna Landis Reist (1895-1981), a PC(USA) missionary from Lancaster, PA, were wed in 1929. The couple remained in Korea until 1942, when they traveled to Mexico to serve there for a few years. In 1946, they resigned from the Mexico Mission.
The younger Baird brother, Richard, followed a similar path. He was also ordained by the Presbytery of New Brunswick after graduating from Princeton Theological Seminary, and he also returned to Korea in 1923, with his new bride, Golden Stockton Baird (1898-1982). For the next 18 years, Richard and Golden served as missionaries under the auspices of the PC(USA) Board of Foreign Missions. They too transferred to a different station during the war years, traveling to the Columbia Mission Station in 1942 while Anna and Will Jr. served in Mexico.
In 1946, the family left Columbia and headed back stateside, where Richard took up a brief pastorate in Tennessee before becoming an Area Representative for the Board of Foreign Missions in September of 1947. From then until the fall of 1957, he traveled broadly, serving short stints in Chicago and San Francisco before jetting off to the Caribbean for three years beginning in 1952. September of 1955 saw him return to the West Coast, where he acted as an Executive Secretary until accepting a role with the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations (COEMAR) in November of 1957.
From late 1957 until January 1961, Richard was in Seoul, Korea, posting letters to his wife back in California that often emphasized his readiness for retirement. Richard did eventually retire from mission service in December of 1964; he passed from this world thirty years later, on January 1, 1995.
It was Richard’s three-year-stint with COEMAR as their Area Representative for Korea that made him the likelier Baird brother to be photographed at the Women’s College cornerstone-laying. However, it looks to be his older brother, Will--a deduction drawn from the slightly crooked front tooth of the man in the image.
Why is Will in attendance? What brought him to Korea in the winter of 1960? The last mention of him in the records at the historical society is of his resignation, along with his wife's, from the Mexico Mission in 1946. But, upon his death on August 5, 1987, his body was laid to rest at the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Korea, where his parents are buried, and where Richard would join him when he passed in 1995. At some point, between his resignation from the Mexico Mission and his death in forty-odd years later, William returned to the country in which he'd grown up. Perhaps he decided to take his brother's position as Area Rep, and was there spending some time with Richard as he prepared for his return to the U.S. the following month. Perhaps, perhaps. These specific details of William's life are lost to the past, and all that is left is speculation and wonder and an incandescent joy of discovery.
The Baird Family Papers live at in the archives of the Presbyterian Historical Society. The earliest items in the collection date to the turn of the 20th century, with the end date of the collection’s range landing in the early 1970s. The collection consists of two boxes, one holding oversized photographs and materials. This photograph—of a gleeful Will Jr. at the cornerstone laying of the new women’s college in Seoul—is one of the many images from the family’s records.
Seoul Women’s College, now the Seoul Women’s University, officially opened its doors to students in April 1961. Its beginnings trail back to the March 1st Independence Movement in 1919, which called for the end of Japanese colonization. The Presbyterian Church of Korea proposed a resolution at the 12th General Assembly meeting, held in 1923, to establish a women’s university. However, because of the oppressive nature of Japanese colonial rule—which had begun in 1910 and would continue until the end of World War II in 1945—the project was thwarted and delayed for decades. The hope of creating a women’s university was placed on the backburner, where it simmered until the late 1950s, when the Presbyterian Church of Korea raised $150,000 at an American conference. These funds went toward the school’s construction—in December 1960, when approval was finally granted, is when the cornerstone-laying ceremony was held. The institution continues to exist today.
Related Resources
- Browse the Baird Family Papers digital collection in Pearl
- Access the collection guide to the Baird Family Papers
- Access the collection guide to the Annie Laurie Adams Baird Papers
- Access the collection guide to the William M. Baird Papers
- Read through Golden Stockton Baird's and Richard Baird’s digitized correspondence
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